Microsoft is all set to launch the next versions of its flagship Windows and Office productivity suite in the next few months. But even before it can confirm the official release date for Office 2010, technical previews of the new version have started circulating in torrent sites all over the world.

While build 14.0.4302.1000 of Office 2010 is expected to arrive sometime in early 2010, Microsoft has released a teaser trailer for Office 2010 – The Movie. The viral video depicts an Office operative hunting for a hacker who goes about uploading a rogue font that kills people.

Talking about “What’s New” in Office 2010 and Office Mobile 2010, the video highlights some of the USPs of the new Office Web Applications 2010, which will reportedly be compatible with both Windows and Mac and will also run smoothly on Firefox. Office Mobile 2010 on the other hand, has been designed to run on any smartphone currently available.

Even as the tech giant put out the video, the latest round of technical previews of Office 2010 have been leaked to a number of torrent sites. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office 2010 have been downloaded around 1,200 times through these torrent sites so far. Some of the new screenshots that have been leaked with the technical preview show Office 2010 having a full ribbon UI and somewhat different tab-style layout from Office 2007.

The leak is the second one for Office 2010, the first one being the invite-only technical preview from Microsoft that got leaked in May of this year. While Microsoft previews get leaked all the time, what makes this leak surprising is that Microsoft is yet to announce that it is ready to invite developers to preview Office 2010.

This announcement is expected at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference starting today; Microsoft is also likely to demonstrate some of the new features of suite at this conference. Notable among these are the online versions Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, all of which will reportedly be available in the new web-based Office Web applications for free.

If these reports are to be believed, Microsoft will be wading straight into a fight for supremacy in the online realm against Google. While Google’s free online office applications have failed to make a dent on Microsoft Office’s standing, the move from Microsoft to go online for free might push the web giant even further out of contention.

According to a report by ComputerWorld, Microsoft has plans of putting out an open public beta for Office 2010 later in the year, though the exact date of the Beta launch is still a closely guarded secret.

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